研究概要 |
Supercontinuum (SC) generation in optical fibers has been a topic of great interest because it can provide multiwavelength optical sources with high coherence and brightness which are useful for many potential applications such as wavelength division multiplexing transmission, optical frequency combs, spectroscopy and optical coherence tomography. However, SC spectra can also suffer from significant fluctuations in amplitude and it is important that the SC source is generated with low noise and with high spectral flatness. Recently, tellurite glasses have been employed for MOFs instead of silica glasses due to their high nonlinearity, wide transmission in the mid-IR region, low attenuation and high thermal stability. Several efforts have been devoted to obtain tellurite MOFs with flattened dispersion profiles because they can enhance the nonlinear spectral broadening and the spectral flatness of SC generation. But, they require very complex fiber structures which are difficult to be fabricated.
In order to control chromatic dispersion profile of tellurite fibers in higher extent but simplify their fiber structure, our group proposed a tellurite hybrid microstructured optical fiber (HMOF). The fiber was successfully fabricated and its chromatic dispersion was tailored to be near-zero and flattened with three zero-dispersion wavelengths at 1270, 1973 and 3627 nm. For the first time, we observed a broad and flattened SC spectrum with 5-dB spectral flatness over 1060 nm spectral bandwidth by using a 20-cm-long segment of the fabricated tellurite HMOF.
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